Mr. Bungle performs at Fox Theater in Oakland on May 23, 2023. Nate McKinley/STAFF. OAKLAND — Mike Patton’s eclectic musical tastes were on full display Tuesday night at the Fox. The Mr. Bungle (and Faith No More) frontman kicked off a 90-minute set of relentlessly chugging thrash metal with…

Ministry performs at The Warfield in San Francisco on April 16, 2022. Nathan McKinley/STAFF. SAN FRANCISCO — Lots of gritty sci-fi movies include a scene set in some futuristic nightclub where loud music and flashing lights serve as a backdrop for scruffy characters exchanging a thumb drive, taking designer…

Recipes are tricky things. A pinch too much of one ingredient and you’ve gone from flavor town to gak-ville in the blink of a taste bud. Even when the individual ingredients are delicious, sometimes the combination of flavors only appeals to a very specific palate. Tonic Immobility, the fifth…

It’s a safe bet that whatever apocalypse befalls our planet, the catastrophic end of everything will be survived by cockroaches, tardigrades and grunge progenitors the Melvins. The band’s core duo of guitarist-singer King Buzzo (Roger Osbourne) and drummer Dale Crover have carpet-bombed rock and roll with more than a hundred…

Dale Crover is perhaps the most interesting man in grunge music. The Melvins’ drummer formed a band with Kurt Cobain in the 1980s called Fecal Matter and recorded some of the earliest Nirvana demos, including a couple songs on that band’s first album, Bleach. Crover has also played in Redd…

Redd Kross performs at Slim’s in San Francisco on Dec. 19, 2018. Photos: Sean Liming. SAN FRANCISCO — Wednesday was a busy night for drummer Dale Crover and bassist Steve McDonald at Slim’s. The pair did double duty; McDonald joining openers Dale Crover Band on bass, and Crover drummed for seminal…

RIFF wants you to get out to more shows! To help you with that, here are our picks for where to go and who to see next week. RIFF’s video concert series features artists of all genres, with a focus on the best hidden gems the local music scene has to offer. If you’re…

The Melvins perform at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco on July 10, 2017. Alessio Neri/STAFF. SAN FRANCISCO — The sold-out crowd inside the Great American Music Hall hummed with excitement as the Melvins took the stage for their sixth show in a marathon 62-date American tour in…

For the last three decades the Melvins have charted their own wayward course through the heart of rock and roll, confounding critics and conventional wisdom at every turn. How many other bands can claim to have opened for Kiss in front of a quarter of a million people, hired…

Every week there’s a plethora of new music at our fingertips. Artists on platforms like Spotify and Bandcamp are plentiful, and the radio offers a steady deluge of new singles, but who has time to sort through all that? RIFF does! We’ve pooled our resources to find some of…